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Promoting Email Submits With Free Traffic

This is one of the winning entry on ML’s Share Your Secret Contest that was held last year.

So not everyone has the cash when starting out affiliate marketing, as you know affiliate marketing requires some hefty cash from our side even when starting out. Although, there are free coupons from AdWords, Yahoo and MSN occasionally, the truth is its hard to time it because all the coupons are already used up even before you know there’s a coupon available. Here is what I normally do with it. I utilize easy converting e-mail submit offers and use free traffic. Let me explain.

First, take a look at the MarketLeverage Offers.You see there are over 10 offers of this kind. For those who do not know, e-mail submits are offers that you get paid for a valid e-mail address from customers. It costs nothing to consumers and the pixel is fired on the first page of an offer. Easy money, eh?

Now we head on to the landing page. Basically we cannot direct link here because we’re not using pay per click. Now I know building a landing page seems to be frightful experience for newbies but here’s a tip that I think will make sense. In some point of time last January, I used it and I can say it worked and is definitely working. First let’s use the iPod Nano e-mail submit offer. Take a look:

So read the description of the campaigns properly because some offers are strict and most are not. Do also take note of what country does the offer accepts traffic from. In this case it’s the United States. Now back to the landing page… most people don’t use this and I’m sure others will find it silly to do it but one easy way of building a landing page is just getting the e-mail creative for that and putting it into your site. Take a look at this:

What I do is just try to copy the e-mail HTML content and put it into my site. Again, most people will find it silly but actually if you look at the codes it’s actually search engine optimized and you just need to do a little tweaking in it. You can basically add a title to the title tag and such stuff. Looking with what it looks like here it goes:

Not bad, eh? I believe the site looks good enough to attract readers. Of course, you can do your own landing page if you have more skills but again for those who know virtually nothing, that is definitely a quick way.

So we’re now into getting traffic. At the start we said we’re not gonna use pay per click and we will try to squeeze anything using free methods. Although the income potential are definitely lower with free traffic, it’s still possible to make money from it. First make sure you install Google Analytics to your site so you could split test your pages, see the data and make adjustments. Now how do I promote it? Here it goes:

Forum Marketing – Everyone knows exactly the power of forums but how do they utilize it? It depends. Now I assume you are a quality member of a certain forum, meaning you’re not just signed up yesterday. In my case, I’m a big fan of basketball and I am a member of some famous forums about basketball for a long time which means I have the reputation. So I try to put the landing page URL in my signature and of course I try to use an attractive anchor to attract clicks. Another secret I do is I pawn the off topic section of forums with the offer itself. In the off topic section I post something like “I heard this site gives Nanos upon completion of surveys so I signed up, what do you guys think?” Be careful though with this because it can get you banned! Freebies forums tend to also do well with it. Want some freebies forums, then here’s the list of sites that normally have 2000 uniques a day.

http://www.freestuffhotdeals.com/freebies/

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/free-stuff/

http://www.bobsfreestuffforum.co.uk/

http://www.totallyfreestuff.com/submit.asp?m=0

Blog Catalog – Now this has got to be something most people don’t do. Blog Catalog is a known directory for blogs and while its known to be a site that has some serious 100,000 visitors a day, I don’t see a lot of marketers using the discussion page for it. The discussion page is great for traffic as well. But the main key here is putting up a discussion that can intrigue a lot of people. One for example is when I tried promoting the “Coke or Pepsi” offer from ML before. Look:

The discussion got about 110 replies, 50% of them clicked the link and 7 have actually made conversions. So you see it makes sense considering all you need to do is type. It varies depending on the type of offer though, as some tend to perform really well as opposed to others.

Incentivizing – Now here it depends on the offer. Most likely there are few offers that allow incentivization of their offers. How do you incentivize then? The sky is the limit actually! I give Entrecard credits, I give free stuff, I tell them they will get a free domain for this and that, etc. Incentivizing is like “bribing” them to do something in your favor. In the end it benefits you both. Again you must first contact your affiliate manager with regards to these matters.

That’s it. Now if it builds you up a few hundred dollars, then maybe you could jump into bigger waters now and start doing pay per click without worrying about money to spend. Hope this helps!

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This was a great and clear walk thought on how to set up an affiliates landing page. I never knew it was so easy. Add the html code pick your products, marketed the landing page it all seems to easy. I wouldn’t use blogcatalog but it’s still a good example!